People who condemn birth control always argue as if one wished to teach this knowledge indiscriminately to the young. Perhaps it is natural that those who oppose the use of reason should assume that others are as irrational as themselves. All I can say is that I no more believe in teaching birth control to the young than I believe in feeding beefsteak to nursing infants. There is a period in life for beefsteaks--or, if my vegetarian friends prefer, for lentil hash and peanut butter sandwiches; in exactly the same way there is a time for teaching the fundamentals of sex, and another time for teaching the art of happiness in marriage, which includes birth control. That brings me, by a very pleasant transition, to the other two subjects which I have promised to discuss: early marriage and education for marriage. CHAPTER XL EARLY MARRIAGE (Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the duty of parents in respect to them.) I have shown how economic forces in our society make for later and later marriage; and at the present time economic forces are so overwhelming that all other forces are hardly worth mentioning in comparison. You are, let us say, the mother of a boy of eighteen, and you have what you call "common sense"--meaning thereby a grasp of the money facts of life. If your darling boy of eighteen should come to you with a grave face and announce, "Mother dear, I have met the girl I love, and we have decided that we want to get married"--you would consider that the most absurd thing you had ever heard in all your born days, and you would tell the lad that he was a baby, and to run along and play. If he persisted in his crazy notion, you and your husband and all the brothers and sisters and relatives and friends both of the boy and the girl would set to work, by scolding and ridiculing, to make life a misery for them, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred you would break down the young couple's marital intention.